T
he matte-blue mountains out the airplane window were thin and flat like they’d been cut from paper. Cloaked and clouded, they haunted the gauzy horizon. That same night I saw my first glacier. Its face was a blue nearly painful to look at, raw and unashamed and naïve as it was. At the airport Don hauled my bags into the back of his pick-up truck. He and his wife Margaret owned the fish and chips restaurant that had provided me with a job and a reason to fly this far. When I stepped off that plane, I knew nothing about this town or this state, just the make and model of the car with which Don would pick me up. In my mind, Alaska was exceptionally quiet. As far as I imagined, nothing awaited me there. The road from Anchorage to Whittier along the Turnagain Arm is belted to the feet of mountains, drawn thinly between land and sea. Captain Cook named this long inlet of water in warning after his expedition navigated the narrow passage to its mouth, and, finding no outlet to open water, had no choice but to turn back. Grey rain sheeted down the cliffs into grey water. Don raced the minutes in tight, sure turns. Ten p.m. had come and gone, and we were in danger of arriving too late. If we arrived after 11:15, he told me, after the tunnel had closed, we wouldn’t be able to enter Whittier that night.
Whittier is a winking crescent moon, curled into the shoulder of a mountain basin and cradled by the sea. The only route to cross the tight ring of peaks that surrounds it on three sides is a tunnel, two and a half miles long. Barring arrival by boat or small plane, it is the only throughway in or out of town. While he sped, Don grinned and told me how he had come to be in Alaska. A friend had told fantastic stories of land up here for the taking, squatter’s rights to dream of, and a lavish minimum wage. Don and this buddy drove up from Nebraska in a full Winnebago, with Don’s BMW motorcycle hitched to the back. A sharp turn, a slick road, and the bike, his get-a-away, was dashed against a wall of rock and ruined. The stories weren’t true. The promises broke. Don, stunned at a payphone in Anchorage, hung up too proud to dial the numbers and ask the favors that could get him home. He laughed telling me this, decades later, still in the state of his exile. Every Alaskan who wasn’t born to this land has a story of her migration. I wonder how many thought they came seeking something, and how many knew that they had come to test how much could be left behind. Alaska draws the recluse, the restless, the solitary soul in need of greater communion with this great Earth. I’ve heard it said that if Alaska is where Americans—independent and uncompromising—go to make their escape, then Whittier is a cavern within that wilderness where Alaskans might go, to get further away.
E
ver heard of this place?” reads an Anchorage Daily News article from 1941, the year the U.S. Army broke ground on the tunnel, boring through Maynard Mountain from both sides at once, “Well, you will!” The new town would replace Seward as the primary military port in Alaska. It would be a vision of efficiency and security. In case of emergency, Anchorage would evacuate to the town and the eight safe houses in its tunnel. In fewer than twenty years, the base would be scrapped, and near-abandoned. The City of Whittier is a world entire. The great myth of Alaska— harsh but rewarding, distant, lawless, primal, pristine—is alive here, unglorified and unique. From the entrance of the tunnel to the end of an unfinished road, Whittier is only three miles long—just barely longer than the tunnel itself. It can be mapped in fewer than 15 streets. Hours here have a small town’s drawling density. It is not timeless, but time-heavy. Minutes stretch out like mountain ranges, beautiful and frightening and impossible to escape. Everyone’s got a tall-tale to make them pass. I’ve been told that Whittier was named best-tasting water in the country, two years running. I hear there’s a goldmine across the bay. It’s all true or it’s all false, and all of it matters: how anyone came to live in this unlikely land, how this city of no city came to be.
For the first fifty years of the tunnel’s existence, only trains could pass through its vault. In winter, they ran between Whittier and Portage only three days a week. One of those trains carried Babs to Whittier thirtyfour years ago, with a broken shoulder and a broken jaw. She’d left a violent husband down in Seward, whose photograph she gave to the train crew. They kept an eye out for him, so even though he tried to hike the tunnel, though he’d call, spitting threats in the middle of the night, she knew that there wasn’t a train for another two days. Whittier was desolate, but it was safe. These days, cars pass through the tunnel as well: in single file, into Whittier on the bottom of the hour, and out on the top. Metal gates on either end seal it at night. Like a camera of geologic proportions, the great yawning aperture opens and closes, its dispassionate shutter set to a generous supply of time. Don and I barely made the last opening that night. We sped into its mouth, and then, inside, slowed to a crawl. The passage, at twenty-five miles an hour, lasted a small eternity. Inside was dark, tall, and narrow. The walls are rock—rough, unpolished, uncovered—and they bear the full weight of the mountain behind them. I felt that I was traveling through the body of the earth. Finally the light at the end bloomed into an exit and came pouring down upon us. Walls of rain erased the mountains and buildings. The town was drowning in a viscous, clotted grey. Back on the other side of the tunnel, Whittier is notorious for weather like this. It’s always shittier in Whittier, they say with a smirk in other towns. Prisoners of Whittier, they condemn. Though the tunnel connects Whittier to the rest of Alaska, it’s come to represent all that separates and divides the town. At 10:45, when the tunnel closes for the night, one is acutely aware which side of Maynard Mountain one is stranded on.
The tunnel reached just yards into the mountain when the bombing of Pearl Harbor propelled America into war. The site of the new port to be constructed at Whitter was chosen for its geographic benefits: its proximity to Anchorage, its year-round ice-free harbor, and its endless, interminable fog. The Army hoped that enemy planes would never even see Whittier through all that soup. In case they did—and to escape freezing cold and 40-foot snows—the base was consolidated into a minimum of buildings, linked by underground tunnel. The town was to look lifeless and abandoned from above. On a hill overlooking the harbor, construction began on the cornerstone of Whittier’s grand future: the Buckner Building, the “City Under One Roof.” When it was completed in 1953, it was the largest building in the Alaskan territory. It housed more than 1,000 soldiers, who would scarcely need to go outside. Inside were a darkroom, rifle range, bowling alley, and swimming pool. One night in its theater Ingrid Bergman entertained troops from the magnificent stage. To the right of the Buckner Whittier’s second Cold War monolith was built. The Hodge was a high-rise apartment building for officers’ families, and the second largest building in Alaska. It connected to the Buckner via yet another subterranean path. With the infrastructure in place, and land earmarked for growth, Whittier was primed to be a bustling port.
Today Whittier’s designation as a city fits it like a garment for a vestigial organ. In 1959 Alaska became a state, prompting a swift consolidation of the state’s resources and manpower. Whittier was decommissioned as a military base. Shipments slowed, then stopped. A wartime population of 1,200—the highest this infrastructure ever held— quickly dwindled to 48. Of the fewer than 200 people who live in Whittier yearround today, nearly eighty percent live in the Hodge, renamed Begich Towers Incorporated, or the BTI. On the ground floor are a post office, Laundromat, and corner store. The school is connected through a tunnel in the basement, beside the one-room church. Behind a door marked faintly, “Cabin Fever,” Babs runs a video-store and tanning bed, where she watches the news and chain-smokes long brown cigarettes. There is no thirteenth floor in the BTI because this is still America, as unrecognizable as it may be. Policemen live down the hall from marijuana dealers, bartender down the hall from missionary. When the wind blows in Whittier like it’s aching to kill, it is louder in those hallways than it is outside.
W
hen I could not sleep through the sun-soaked nights, I covered my window in the BTI with black garbage bags, poked a hole in the center, and turned my room into a camera. I lived with the shadowy projection of the parked cars, and the cannery, and the mountains and sea, shimmering, upside-down on my ceiling and walls. This city was, for me, a photographer’s dream. I worked at the restaurant ten-, eleven-hour days, and left at midnight with light still in the sky. The mountains lurked in every window. I couldn’t keep them out of the frame. I never tired of seeing that spectral nighttime sun caught on film, nor of hearing the stories that drew people here from across the world, out of their disparate lives, and into this unexpected sanctuary we shared. Tourists—German, Russian, Japanese, Americans up from the Lower 48, Alaskans on their way out onto the water—used to point to the BTI through the restaurant window and laugh, “This has to be the most opposite from New York you could find.” I never quite saw it that way. They were fun-house versions of each other, with the tunnel as warped mirror between. In New York I also lived in enormous buildings, populated by hundreds of people, and I travelled vast distances via tunnels in the ground. New York is a gargantuan maze: a cacophony of choices, an excess of strangers, a highway of bright, sleepless ecstasy that can crash without notice into a bitter, stunted end. The maze has many entrances and exits, true and false. Time is always in short supply.
Whittier, on the other hand, is a labyrinth. It is spiraled in on itself, geographically infinitesimal, a town with more hallways than streets, where every face has been worn familiar, and there’s only one way out. The labyrinth is not designed to confuse, but to test. It is an endeavor of duration, one that rewards the patient and persevering. Time is thick enough to taste. New York speeds up, forgets itself. Whittier’s history, as lived through its infrastructure, is braided into the stories of all who live and pass through here, as though the buildings were characters themselves. To inhabit Whittier, one also inhabits the myth of Whittier and the two are endlessly intertwined. One night I was last in the Anchor bar with Beverly. As she closed out unpaid tabs, she told me her story. I’d heard it before, but this time she swore she’d only stayed in Whittier as long as she had because of subliminal tapes a jealous boyfriend made. It was four in the morning. Beverly sighed, “At least as far as I can figure that’s the only reason I’m still here.” Beverly first came to Alaska with her band, in her bombshell, Miss-America twenties. She was a singer, beautiful and wild. Her first husband promised her fame, took her to Whittier, and built her a bar atop the Anchor Inn: above the basement Laundromat, above the restaurant with weak but plentiful coffee, above the corridor of hotel rooms rented to permanent guests. The Anchor bar was built atop it all, with a stage on the west wall where Beverly could sing. That was fifteen years ago. Beverly still tends bar at the Anchor under a blown-up Polaroid of herself at 21, when every man she met offered her the world. There’s a jukebox where she requests songs to sing at the top of her lungs. When the bar is slow, she sets up the karaoke machine and sings to the chairs and the pool tables.
People arrive for every reason, and stay for others they often couldn’t have dreamed. Sometimes the years just turn into decades. Sometimes, the choice is not theirs to make. There’s Mandy, who arrived in Whittier as I did, a summer waitress, met her husband and has taught at the school for eight years. There are the restless teenagers, born and raised here, who love Whittier in the summer when it fills with young workers, but who in the winter feel the tunnel close as though a noose around their necks. There is Gary, who for fifteen years worked at the manual weather station, requiring that he log the weather once an hour for eighteen hours a day, every day of the week. In those fifteen years he spent fewer than ten nights outside of Whittier. When I asked whether he would leave now that the station is automated, his eyes got wide. “That’d be a big step,” he said, “leaving Whittier.” There are those who can live by the ocean and those who fear its wrath; those who can live on a mountain and those who fear the thin-ness of its air. There are those who could live in the largest city on the bloated face of this teeming earth. What makes a place bearable or unbearable to its inhabitants are the stories they tell themselves: about safety, comfort, companionship; about resilience, faith, pride, fear. Stories are both a natural resource and a construction; the homes we live in and the wilderness they protect us from. Whittier’s is an architecture of boundaries: the sea and the mountains, perforated by the tunnel; the BTI, that city in a building; the grand Buckner, a sand dune where crashes the tide of years. The spaces we inhabit shape and order our lives, and so as we construct, alter, and destroy them, we renovate the stories we tell ourselves, and we structure our lives with these stories.
Whittier is structured as a rabbit hole. Every story opens into another cavern, each larger and darker than the last. The tunnels that squirrel between its buildings are mostly sealed off now, but its history deepens still. “As always,” proclaimed Emerson, “we enter through the theater.” He threw open a rusted door onto a stage like the mouth of an aquatic beast. An audience of rotten red upholstered chairs watched rapt, tongues slack, in their grave of graffiti and mildew. This was the stage of the Buckner Building. Just 7 years after it opened its doors, the town was mothballed, and the Buckner was shuttered indefinitely. In the 80s, there was hope it would become a Safeway, or a prison, but asbestos and lack of capital stalled those plans. When she first arrived, Babs would wait for the rain to freeze, and ice-skate down its halls. When Jim drank, he would bring his bottle and his loneliness to the concrete carcass, singing and wailing until the police chased him out. On the fourth of July I watched the fireworks from its roof. The echo of those thunderous cracks drummed through the peaks, unceasing and unbroken. The experience of Whittier is different for a year-round resident than it is for the fleeting summer workers. In the summer Whittier’s population more than triples, as young lovers come to fill the seasonal jobs and local bars. They serve food, crew ships, gut fish, clean hotels, and the when the season ends, they pack up and are gone. Historians write about a “wall in the mind” that persisted for Berliners long after the physical Wall was in ruins. After I left Whittier, I thought often of the tunnel in the mind I carried with me, and its call of escape and belonging.
Now in winter, two years since I first travelled that passage, I write letters to Morgan in California. Every summer for the past nine years he has worked on a ship in Whittier. Back and forth, we tell each other stories and, faintly, we inhabit it this way. “Whittier seems to understand,” he wrote, “that despite the rugged individualism that characterizes Alaskans, people still require people.” Our long days of work melted into nights by the bonfire. There were too few people in town to be divided by age or occupation, and so anyone might be drawn to stand by the blaze. The power of the land, and our imperceptibility beside it, inspired an awe that could silence us all. Anyone who came to watch that fire be ripped into sparks by the wind and howl into darkness was here, and here alone; here, and here together. But the summer ends, and the winter is long. To live in Whittier is to live as though on an island. For some people the island provides all that could be desired or needed. For others, community turns eventually into claustrophobia, solitude into solitary confinement. From August to October the temporary residents, the half-Whitts, enact a slow diaspora—a people who arrived, as I did, for the promise of a job, and have lived with the promise of a tunnel ever since.
A
ll that summer I awaited Whittier’s infamously atrocious weather, its fabled winds and lacerating rain. June and July were clear and crisp and bright. Then, in August, the storm began. The fog was so heavy it obliterated mountains. The sea boiled with nine-foot waves. For three days it rained. On the third day not one customer walked through the door of the restaurant. In the tense air of an empty, rain-soaked morning, Don and I clashed over a bowl of cereal I’d eaten. Slow as it was, Don sent me home for the day. I returned to the restaurant an hour later. The rain had insinuated itself into the very folds of my skin and bones. Don was standing at the back door in his baseball cap and tie-dyed apron, looking out into the storm. “I don’t want it,” I said, from the bottom of the steps outside. He nodded and opened the door. He walked down the steps, walked right past me, would have walked through me if he’d known how. I turned around to face his back. “Thank you,” I said. “I loved working here.” He stopped. He turned. He snarled a pitying grin. He slowly drew out his arms out to the sides, as though he would embrace me. I walked into his arms.
Without the job, I had no place to live. Whittier’s collar of mountains suddenly choked. But I was free to go. Just on the other side of the tunnel was the rest of Alaska: a wide rugged landscape, a vista of adventures tall and handsome and alluring. For the first time, I was aware of its immensity. If I hitchhiked for hundreds of miles, I would barely cover a few inches of map. For two weeks I hitched up and down the Seward Highway, down to Homer and up to Trapper Creek. In Hope, on the solstice, I proclaimed my love of Whittier to a bonfire of strangers. Back on the highway the next morning two Australian women flagged me down. “Hey, it’s always prettier in Whittier!” they shouted. I already knew. Because always, at the end of each of those journeys, when I was dirty and tired and in need of a home in this vast, strange land, it was Whittier I journeyed back to. Whittier where I knew I had a couch to sleep, and a bartender who’d call me by name. Once when I emerged from that tunnel exhausted again, I found street signs had been installed in my absence. I’d never considered the streets had names before.
Jim told me, late on the eve of my final departure, “If you can deal with yourself, you can love Whittier.” He’s a lifer, came for work and stayed for the quiet, which hasn’t run out after twenty years. Like Sue, who jokes that the lack of a graveyard in town means she’ll never die, he intends to remain on that side of the tunnel. As for me, not a day has gone by since I left that sanctuary that I have not thought of it, or wrote of it, or pored over the images I carried back, shining with the faintest reflection of salvaged light. At times, it has seemed that every story I hear is a Whittier story. They are stories that didn’t happen in Whittier, not about Whittier, that happened to people who remained squarely on the other side of the tunnel. But then they are stories about being trapped somewhere there’s only one way out of, in which you can get home, but you’d have to swim upstream to do it. Long before he would berate me for my speed and forgetfulness, before I would pack my bags and leave, long, long before I would return to Whittier and find his unspoken forgiveness, Don told me another story. Gesturing out over fields of long, snaked fissures on the Turnagain Arm, he warned me against ever setting foot on the mud-flats, lest I meet the same fate as the honey-mooning man who sank to his waist and had to be pulled out by helicopter. Don looked at me meaningfully over his handlebar mustache. “Only, what was below the waist never came out.”
This is no land for the uninitiated. The honey-mooning man did not know the power of this great earth, that it might swallow him whole. He did not know enough to fear it. I am still a stranger to this land, but I know this: as my plane circled Anchorage for a landing the night of my second arrival, I realized I would not recognize my birthplace from the air, but every bend of the Turnagain all the way to Whittier is etched like constellation on my mind. Two years ago I drove its blade-thin ribbon and learned the same lesson as did Captain Cook, two hundred years ago, on his search for an outlet to the sea. My departure would always necessitate return. Without always turning back, I would not be permitted to leave.